Why Do So Many People Die in Aviation Accidents in Indonesia?

The headlines over the weekend were all too familiar: yet another commercial aircraft taking off from an Indonesian airport in foul weather crashes in a remote location; all aboard are presumed dead. This time, it involved Trigana Air Service, a small carrier little-known outside the archipelago nation, but one with a dubious safety record–four crashes and 14 incidents in two decades.

On Monday, Indonesia's government confirmed that a Trigana ATR 42-300 carrying 54 people was missing, after departing from Jayapura, in Papua province on the island of New Guinea, enroute to Oksibil, about an hour's flight away. But rescue workers were unable to reach the presumed crash site, which is located at an elevation of 8,500 feet in terrain so rugged that military units were called in to quickly construct a helipad so that search choppers could land. Emergency teams were set to try again to reach the site on Tuesday.

Indonesia had been called out by authorities for lax supervision of its growing airline industry.

While the immediate focus will be finding the wreckage and determining what went wrong, the disaster is yet again putting Indonesia's aviation safety oversight in a bad light. It's the third crash of an Indonesian plane in just eight months, and the country had already been called out by international authorities for lax supervision of its growing airline industry.

Seven years ago, the European Union put the country's 63 scheduled airlines on its blacklist, effectively barring them from European airspace. The EU later lifted the prohibition, but only for four larger airlines, including Garuda and Indonesia Air Asia. The FAA has also put Indonesia on its list of countries that don't meet international standards, along with a handful of other outliers like Bangladesh, Ghana and Nicaragua.

So what is the problem? The basic issues aren't hard to fathom; with a population of 250 million, spread over thousands of islands, Indonesia's air travel sector is booming. Passengers carried by the country's registered airlines more than tripled over a recent five year period, reaching 85.1 million passengers in 2013, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization.

But the government has struggled to keep up with booming demand, and has had difficulty finding qualified staff to carry out inspections and training–at least according to some regional safety experts who've spoken out in the past. And many of the nation's smaller lines are low-fare, no-frills outfits that fly older turboprops in tough conditions: The doomed Trigana plane was 27 years old, and its destination was an airport that lacked modern safety equipment such as a glidescope, according to CNN safety expert and pilot Les Abend.

After the crash of AirAsia flight 8501, which went down in the Java Sea in a storm last December midway through a flight from Surabaya to Singapore, killing 162 people, several Indonesian transportation officials were suspended. That followed revelations that the flight was allowed to depart without proper clearances. But critics say more action is needed, calling for increased oversight and improvements in pilot training.

Initially, the Trigana accident appears to be a classic example of CFIT—controlled flight into terrain—but that type of accident is far less common than it used to be due to the development of advance ground proximity warning systems (GPWS).

Capt. Mark Weiss, a former commercial airline pilot and now a safety consultant, noted that " in this day and age that should have been installed as required equipment."

In general, he said, "the ATR is a rugged, sophisticated, reliable aircraft," but what isn't known, he added, is whether the pilots were properly trained in handling emergency maneuvers. "That's something that I'm sure will undergo much scrutiny," he said.

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